As mentioned previously i can’t see anything on the internet. I can see entire LAN, but nothing past the router/gateway (our ISP supplied us with a WIFI router that serves as our ADSL end point and of course firewall).

I’m connected via Ethernet. I can ping my LAN addresses and connect to my routers web based GUI, I can tell from the GUI that its connecting to the outside world (has an IP/DNS and gateway assigned) I can ping Google etc using the GUI's ping tool so it is definitely connected to the outside world but for some reason my machine just doesn’t route through when using my non root account.